It is common in most countries that individuals are checked at border checkpoints when entering or exiting the country. Various rules and laws regulate whether individuals are permitted entry or whether entry (or exit) is denied. A common means is the issuance of visas that the grant to the individual access to a country for a given limited period (e.g. 30 or 90 days, etc.) or with no limitations. Usually, the individual presents his/her passport at the border checkpoint when entering the country and an official checks the visa status. If entry can be permitted, a physical stamp or label is applied to the passport that indicates entry (possibly in conjunction with an entry location and date) or represents the visa itself. Upon leaving the country a further mark is applied to the passport, so that the passport can be checked for determining whether an individual is permitted to stay in some country, whether a permissible time has expired, or whether a number of permissible (re)entries to a country is exhausted.
The drawback with stamps and labels, or in general a mark, applied to passports and other security documents is that the location and quality of the mark in the document may vary to a great extent. Specifically, a stamp (rubber stamp) may be applied with poor quality so that legibility of the mark is adversely affected or the mark interferes with already existing marks so that their respective legibility is affected. Furthermore, the position of corresponding marks (e.g. entry stamp and exit stamp) may not be well-defined so that officials have to browse the entire passport so as to look for an entry stamp and so as to look for a suitable location of an exit stamp. This takes time and the officer at the checkpoint is only able to process a limited number of individuals per given time. Furthermore, security documents such as passports, have only a limited space available for marks, so that inefficient use of the available space may require the issuance of a new passport before a further visa can be applied.
In other words, official (e.g. visa, entry, exit, customs form) stamps are occasionally incorrectly applied to the associated security document (e.g. passports with stamps stamped on an incorrect section of a passport, such as within the boundaries of a machine-readable zone). Official stamps may further be occasionally improperly applied (e.g. showing the wrong date or time, non-uniformly applied so as to be smudged or include illegible portions), or the wrong stamp-type (e.g. work visa, student visa, etc.) is occasionally stamped on a passport, or an official (e.g. visa) stamp may be improperly issued (e.g. stamped on a passport when the passport holder does not in fact qualify for the selected official stamp). In addition to the above, physical rubber stamps are easy to copy or otherwise counterfeit.
At the same time, electronic systems for issuing and authenticating security documents, such as passports, identity cards, visa, driving licenses, and the like, are common practice in most countries all over the world today. Such systems usually comprise central data repositories that are connected by means of well protected, closed protocols and data links to the equipment and terminals in the field. The field equipment usually comprises data terminals, scanners, printers, and the like.
Usually, authorized personnel employ such systems at, for example, border checkpoints (immigration), authority office premises, airports, and mobile checkpoints as part of common police patrols. Specifically, authorized personnel may check a security document from an owner in the field by querying personal data taken from the security document by means of accessing the mentioned special central data repositories. The system may provide an analysis result to a terminal in the field so that the personnel can take appropriate action, e.g. letting the checked person pass a security checkpoint, arresting the checked person, providing the checked person with a certificate, applying a stamp or mark to the presented security document, etc. For example, an officer can query the system whether a presented passport and visa is genuine and correspondingly retrieve information whether or not a mark to the passport should be applied and the individual can pass the checkpoint and enter the country. It is further common that the field equipment produces self-adhesive labels, for example with a two-dimensional barcode and other features, so that the officer can simple print such a label and apply it to the passport.
The publication U.S. Pat. No. 7,314,162 discloses a method and system for reporting identity document usage by storing in a database and reporting to an identity document owner instances in which that person's driver's license, passport or other government-issued identification documents are presented as a form of ID, thereby facilitating early notification of identity theft.
Further, the publication U.S. Pat. No. 7,503,488 discloses a method of assessing the risk of fraud before issuing a driver's license to an applicant on the basis of the relative incidence of fraud historically associated with the particular combination of collateral identification documents (e.g. birth certificate, passport, student ID card, etc.) presented by the applicant in their application for the driver's license.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a system for remote mark printing on security documents that makes, one the one hand, efficient use of existing infrastructure (i.e. equipment in the field, central data processing and repositories, and networks connecting the same), and on the other hand, is sufficiently secure and reliable so that it can be used in the context of security documents, such as passports. It is specifically and object of the present invention to provide a solution to the problematic and unsatisfactory application of marks to passports and security documents.
In addition to the above, it may desirable to respond to the theft, copying, and/or counterfeiting of a country's official (e.g. visa) stamp by rapidly replacing all of the country's official stamps with new stamps having a new design. However, in the case of physical rubber stamps, updating an official stamp involves physical replacement of a multitude of such physical stamps located at a multitude of border control facilities around a country's border, embassies worldwide and other facilities employing such stamps, which is time-consuming and expensive, and thereby inhibits a country's ability to rapidly update their official stamps.